The Asian Actor: Observations by Ariane Mnouchkine

What interests me in Asian tradition is the place of the actor as a creator of metaphors. The actor’s art consists in showing passion, in recounting a human being’s insides. Through Asian theatre, I reazlied that the actor’s mission was to open up the human being like a pomegranate – not in order to show human guts, but in order to sketch them, display them in signs, in forms, in movement in rhythm. – Ariane Mnouchkine

In Asian-inspired theatre, the actor is king, the conduit between the public and the force field of the theatrtical piece, a vector to a different world, one of aesthetic pleasure and of spirituality. Whether through Mask work or other Asian-influenced theatrical techniques, the actor for Mnouchkine, like the puppet evoked by Kleist in 1812, becomes the point of congruence for connecting mind and matter, soul and body, “true theatre” and theatre making. -Judith G Miller, Ariane Mnouchkine, Routledge Performance Practitioners (2007)